• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Gas Spotted By The JWST Could Be Lit Up By The First Stars

March 6, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

The JWST’s observations of the galaxy GN-z11 have revealed a clump of helium in the galactic halo that may contain the much-sought first generation of stars.

Stars like the Sun contain metals only forged in the last stages of stellar life. These elements come from previous generations of stars that produced these heavier elements as their parting gift to the universe. The Sun is called a Population I star, while its immediate predecessors containing lower metal ratios are known as Population II. Some Population II stars can be seen by looking far back in time or finding low mass stars that age slowly.

Advertisement

For a long time one of the priorities of astronomy has been to try to find Population III stars, those that have no predecessors and formed instead from pristine material left behind by the Big Bang. We’ve yet to do this, but may now be getting close.

For seven years GN-z11 was the most distant galaxy known, having been found by the Hubble space telescope and its distance identified in 2015. The JWST took away that crown – but it has given a lot back to GN-z11’s status, revealing the earliest supermassive black hole ever found and nitrogen left behind by so-called “celestial monster” stars 5,000-10,000 times the mass of the Sun.

Since the greater mass a star has, the shorter its lifespan, there’s only a short window to catch such an object while it is active. One step on the road is to identify places where pristine gas, from which Population III stars might form, can be found – and this is what the JWST may now have done.

A team led by Professor Roberto Maiolino found a clump of helium in GN-z11’s halo using the JWST’s Near-infrared Spectrograph. 

Advertisement

“The fact that we don’t see anything else beyond helium suggests that this clump must be fairly pristine,” Maiolino said in a statement. “This is something that was expected by theory and simulations in the vicinity of particularly massive galaxies from these epochs — that there should be pockets of pristine gas surviving in the halo, and these may collapse and form Population III star clusters.”

Indeed, Maiolino thinks Population III stars we have not seen directly may be what are lighting up this gas, something hinted by the width of the doubly ionized emission line in the spectrum.

Although stars are far brighter than patches of gas lit up second hand, they’re also vastly smaller. We’re seeing GN-z11 as it was just 400 million years after the universe formed, and the immense distances involved make clusters of stars, let alone individual objects, exceptionally hard to resolve. Nevertheless, the JWST is scheduled to spend even longer on this crucial galaxy, building up higher-resolution images. Now they know where to look, Maiolino and colleagues hope to use those deeper observations to find stars newly emerged within pristine patches like the one they identified.

If the team are right, we’re in for a treat, with hints the heaviest of the stars they are chasing have masses of at least 500 times that of the Sun. These may not match the “celestial monsters” whose nitrogen legacy was spotted, but they’d be more massive than any stars in our own galaxy, or anything nearby. Collectively, they expect this initial cluster to be releasing around 20 billion times as much light as the Sun.

Advertisement

A report on the discovery has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, and can be seen on ArXiv.org.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. U.S. grounds Virgin Galactic flights pending mishap probe
  2. Argentina draft budget puts 2022 GDP growth at 4%, inflation at 33%
  3. Balloon Designed To Fly Through Corrosive Clouds Of Venus Aces Test Flights
  4. Snorted Tap Water May Be Blamed For Brain-Eating Amoeba Death In US

Source Link: Gas Spotted By The JWST Could Be Lit Up By The First Stars

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Could This Be The Real Reason Humans Survived And Neanderthals Died Out?
  • Newly Discovered Snail Species Named After Studio Ghibli Co-Founder Is A Hairy Beauty
  • 2025 SC79 Is The Second-Fastest Asteroid Ever Found – And Only The Second Within Venus’ Orbit
  • When Red Devil Spiders Arrived On A New Island, Their Genome Dramatically Shrank In Half
  • Is This The World’s Oldest Story? Ancient Human Tale About The Seven Sisters May Be From 100,000 BCE
  • This Pill Is Actually A Tiny Printer That Repairs Internal Injuries Using Biocompatible Ink
  • “This Is Amazing”: Scientists Have Found Evidence Of A Long-Lost World Deep Within The Earth
  • From The Shiniest World To Lava And Eternal Darkness, These Are The Weirdest Known Planets
  • Do Sharks Have Bones?
  • The Zombie Awakens: A Volcano Is Showing “First Signs” Of Unrest After 700,000 Years Of Quiet
  • Two Of The World’s Biggest Earthquakes Seem To Be Synched Together
  • California Has A New State Snake, And It’s A 1.6-Meter-Long Giant
  • Experimental Nanoparticle “Super-Vaccines” Stop Breast, Pancreatic, And Skin Cancers In Their Tracks
  • New Nightmare Fuel Unlocked: Watch The First Known Capture Of A Shrew By A False Widow Spider
  • Peculiar Glow In The Milky Way Might Be Dark Matter Signature
  • “I Was Scared To Death”: Missouri’s Great Cobra Scare Of 1953 Was Eventually Solved After 35 Years
  • Two Spacecraft To Fly Through Comet 3I/ATLAS’s Ion Tail – Will They Be Able To Catch Something?
  • Pioneering Heavy Water Detection Suggests Earth’s Water Might Be Older Than The Sun
  • PhD Students’ Groundbreaking New Technique Rescues JWST’s Highest Resolution Data
  • Popcorn-Like Parasites And Weird Worms Among 14 New Species Discovered In The World’s Oceans
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version